Obama Has Blown Half Of Obamacare's Legal Deadlines

The Obama Administration has missed 41 of 82 legally imposed implementation deadlines, according to a confidential Congressional Research Service memo. 

The memo, obtained by Avik Roy of Forbes, reveals the litany of blown benchmarks:

As of May 31, 2013, when the CRS analysis was completed, the White House had yet to meet 9 of 12 deadlines from the first year after the Affordable Care Act was enacted. It failed to meet 22 of 53 deadlines in the second year; another 8 became moot after Congress did not appropriate funds to complete the assigned tasks. In year three, the administration missed 10 out of 17 deadlines. That’s a total of 41 out of 82 deadlines missed.

If you exclude the 9 deadlines that became moot because Congress never appropriated the funds to meet them, the Obama administration missed 41 out of 73 deadlines, or 56 percent.

Roy says the missed deadlines are a mix of bureaucratic busywork and more economically important benchmarks. Importantly, the CRS analysis did not include the new Obamacare delay on capping customer out-of-pocket expenses, a development that CNN’s John King says “could have a huge political impact.”

Roy says the delays, however, will not stop the Obama Administration from spending $1.9 trillion of taxpayers’ money to implement the law.

“Barring substantial Congressional action, that $1.9 trillion will still get spent, along with trillions more thereafter,” writes Roy. “Only new laws, not wishful thinking, will change that.”